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HERE'S COMPANY

HERE'S COMPANY

$20.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9933139-0-0

Pub Date: Spring 2026

Pages: 94


By Muriel Nelson


Here’s Company celebrates moments when the word we replaces I. Here lyric poems invite you to share secrets, hopes, dreams, hugs, word-play, and memories while the recent isolation of a pandemic and threatening wars lurking in the background make company especially precious. Ranging from the first spare glimpses to more expansive meditations, these poems celebrate such company as that of a homeless woman bringing cheer to passing drivers, a poet and a designer of earthenware who, without ever meeting each other, make similar artistic moves, an instrument “you have to love,” and a loved one’s “A-440” of dependable tuning. These are poems to read aloud, poems of resilience, poems that reveal the joy we can share through our language.

 

    In the opening poem of this collection, we are invited to “Lean close.” “Read,” the poet says, “and we’re only inches apart.” Later she wonders, “could you and I and some menacing leaders sit together?” Such is her belief in the necessity of “we” and the power and delight of language. Whether focused on events of her own daily life or the wider world (the pandemic, the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan) the poet “stares down details and words themselves.” She celebrates other poets (Amichai, Mandelstam, Milosz, Dickinson, Kumin, and more), but also the music of a swishing broom, a sink hole or an empty room, a “real” soprano or “what people say for the sound of it.” Lean in, reader. Enjoy the excellent company of these poems.

    —Grace Bauer, final judge of the Idaho Prize 2025


    [P]hysicalization of language is one of the great magical jobs of poetry, the word rivaling experience in the physical world, the word made flesh. That I think is where [her] work resides.

    —Dean Young



    Muriel Nelson’s publications include the poetry collections Sightsinger (Encircle Publications) and Part Song (Bear Star Press, Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and chapbooks, Please Hold (Encircle Publications, Poetry Chapbook Award) and Most Wanted (ByLine Press, ByLine Chapbook Award). Nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, Nelson’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain Review, New American Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, and other journals as well as in several anthologies. Two of her poems have been set to music. She holds master’s degrees from the University of Illinois School of Music and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Federal Way, Washington.

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